I upgraded my old card to a GTX 560 Ti with 1GB RAM for use with Premiere Pro. Works great with hardware rendering sometimes (I had to add the card to the CUDA text file to enable acceleration). But half the time when skimming through a project or rendering, it spits out an error:"Your hardware configuration does not meet minimum specifications needed to run the application. The application must close."

My drivers are all up to date. From what I've gathered, as soon as Premiere Pro eats up more than 1GB memory, the video card conks out and causes a crash. My projects are mainly image based (I rarely use any actual video), with some images being higher than 1080p.

So is the problem the amount of RAM on my GPU? I've got 8GB in my PC, why can't Premiere use that RAM once the video ram runs out? If I switch back to software rendering it doesn't crash, but of course it takes 4 times longer to render. With my last project, I noted in the Task Manager that Premiere Pro used up 2.2GB of RAM. Does this mean I need to get a GPU with 3GB RAM in order to use acceleration?

There is not necessarily a problem with shortage of graphics card RAM when you have a 1 GB card. I have a GTX460 with 1 GB of RAM, which is far weaker than your card, and I do not get the error. But then I have 32 GB of system RAM, and I am editing a relatively easy Video format.

Before anyone can answer your question you need to say more about your system, the image formats and sizes ("more than 1080p"???) you are editing, and the complexity of your projects.

In a properly functioning system, if a scene requires more RAM than the GPU has, then the entire scene will get switched entirely to the software-only mode (meaning that GPU acceleration will be disabled for that frame). However, if you get error messages like that, more likely you have a problem (usually of configuration) somewhere inside the system. In your case, your work might have demanded more than 6.5GB of RAM just to render (remember, Windows itself eats up 1.5GB if RAM) - and then, your Windows page file might have been disabled completely or restricted to an overly small value in your system configuration.

I'm running an i7 2600K, 8GB RAM, Asus P8H67-I Deluxe, Premiere Pro CS 5.5.2. My last project that it crashed on is 1080 25fps, with many of the images being around 4000x2000. It's basically slideshow material with a couple Sapphire effects here and there. I've just gone in and switched off all Sapphire plugins in the project just incase that might be the problem, and went to render the project. Same error.

I get the same error occasionally on other projects. Sometimes it will fully render with no problem, but other times it will conk out fairly quickly. Some projects seems more susceptible to the crash than others, and I have to switch to software mode.

Thanks for that. It will be something to keep in mind for future projects. With so many people having this problem with large images, I'm guessing the bug has been reported? If the project can render with software only, then shouldn't it be able to render with hardware (even if it takes longer)?

I am still getting this problem, and it seem irrelevant to the size of the images in my project. For instance in my current project, most of my images are well under 1920x1080, with only a couple creeping over said resolution. Yet it still crashes. All I'm doing is text and images, and in this case a BCC starfield generator in the background. I don't do extremely complex work.

I wonder if the video card is overheating? If it was, it seems odd that it would only crash Premiere with nothing else affected. Though I can hear the video card fans spin up when playing back a project or rendering, so I know the card is being taxed at the time.